Artists Marte Eknæs and Nicolau Vergueiro have been commissioned to create a banner around the construction site of the new Munch Museum. Their 48-meter digital collage on PVC conceals but also re-envisions the construction site of the new museum, which opens in 2020.
The title Open 24 hours refers to public art always being available and accessible, which differentiates it from exhibitions inside the museum. The five panels that make up the PVC tapestry depict snapshots of a city on the move and narrate an urban tale set within an imagined landscape of Old Oslo. Real and fictional references conjure up images of construction and destruction, maintenance and repurposing, production and consumption. Playing with the language of architectural presentation by showing models and renderings for the future in combination with historical maps and buildings from the past, the artists conceive of “the urban construction site as an ever-changing still life”.
Marte Eknæs (b. 1978 in Norway) studied at Glasgow School of Art, California Institute of the Arts, and Central Saint Martins in London. She lives and works in Berlin and Espa. Recent exhibitions include Arranged for Effect, Trondheim Kunstmuseum; Foyer Exhibition (with Marianne Hurum), Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; Calculus of Negligence (with Sean Raspet), Room East, New York; Now Open Free Parking at What Pipeline, Detroit and Boom! at Rise Projects, London (both with Nicolau Vergueiro); and a site-specific project with Cookies / OMA, Rotterdam. Her book Formal Economy was published in 2015 by Mousse Publishing.
Nicolau Vergueiro was born in New York and raised in Brazil. He received an MFA in 2002 from CalArts and a BA from UCLA in 2000. Vergueiro has had solo exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris, Pasadena Museum of California Art, and What Pipeline, Detroit (with Marte Eknæs). His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Orange County Museum of Art; David Zwirner Gallery, New York; Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Tokyo; and Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Brazil. Recent projects include Sarau with Nicolau at the Bronx Museum of the Arts; the screening of commissioned video works for Hood By Air: Id at MoMA, New York; and the upcoming première of the feature-length documentary Um Casamento.
